On page two is the really special stuff. A Jeroboam of Krug, the equivalent of four normal bottles, costs £3,000.

Various Methuselahs — each six litres — range from £10,000 to £40,000. That’s equivalent to more than £800 for every single glass.

For the real big spenders, there seems to be only one option, though. At the end of the wine list is a 30-litre, gold-plated Midas of Ace Of Spades champagne, made by high-end producer Armand de Brignac.

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It boasts a pewter label, and a truly eye-popping price tag: £120,000.

As displays of conspicuous consumption go, buying this Midas takes some beating: the fizz, which will go flat if it’s not drunk within a couple of hours, costs the equivalent of almost five years’ wages for an average Briton.

Any punter who buys the bottle, which is so heavy that four waiters must pour it, is paying quite a premium for the privilege of drinking it here, too.

After all, specialist wine retailers sell the very same product for a comparatively modest £39,000.

Decadent: Singer Miley Cyrus was pictured kissing one of the entertainers wearing a giant baby mask on a recent visit to the venue

But, as the £81,000 mark-up suggests, we have entered a parallel universe.

For this steamy basement is the home of Cirque Le Soir, regarded as one of London’s, if not the world’s, most fashionable, and arguably decadent, nightclubs.

In recent months, Cirque, as it is known to regulars, has made headlines worldwide, welcoming an extraordinary succession of stars into its dimly-lit interior, to be entertained by circus acts performing on small podiums.

Singer Rihanna, supermodel Cara Delevingne, musicians Will.i.am and Kanye West, Hollywood actors Bradley Cooper, Leonardo Di Caprio and Jason Statham are just some of the famous patrons to have recently crossed the threshold.

They have often brought scandal in their wake, too. Only last week, for example, photos hit the internet of a peroxide blonde Miley Cyrus, the American pop star, seated on one of the circus-themed club’s purple sofas.

She was locking lips with one of its ‘trademark’ male go-go dancers — a dwarf dressed in a bib and white nappy.

‘He wears a big rubber mask, which is very hard to see out of. So he had no idea what was going on until she stuck her tongue in his mouth. It was a wild night.’

Days earlier, it had been the turn of Sherlock actor Benedict Cumberbatch to make headlines at the venue, where guests are treated to nightly stage shows from magicians, clowns, sword-swallowers, acrobats and burlesque dancers who strip to their nipple tassels.

The supposedly-shy 37-year-old — who days earlier had been photographed in Ibiza with Russian model Katia Elizarova — was accompanied at the venue by flame-haired actress Charlotte Asprey.

Later, they were joined at their table by the unlikely duo of Stephen Fry and fashion designer Matthew Williamson.

'Everything is about conspicuous consumption, and people want fireworks and glitter bombs when they order the biggest bottle.'

Henry Conway, London nightclub impresario

‘They were served champagne and vodka by dancing dwarfs,’ says one witness. ‘It wasn’t what you might call a politically-correct evening’s entertainment, given the group’s Left-wing politics. But they had a blast.’

The Canadian singer, in London on tour, had booked a table at the club — which has a popcorn machine, arcade games and other fairground attractions — to celebrate his 19th birthday at the start of March.

But he was shown the door after it emerged that several members of his party were in their early teens.

On Twitter, Bieber promptly told his 42 million followers that it had been his ‘worst birthday’ and described Cirque as a ‘weak ass club’.

In a statement, the Cirque countered that, in addition to being underage, several members of his entourage ‘smelled heavily of weed’.

‘What actually happened,’ Berg now tells me, ‘is that he turned up with Jaden Smith, who is Men In Black star Will Smith’s son, and who I knew was just 14 years old.

‘I had to tell Justin that it wasn’t on and ask him to leave. We’re sorry about what happened.

Celebrity favourite: Pixie Geldof, left, and Miley Cyrus are pictured leaving the Soho club after a recent night out there

'I mean, we had decorated the whole venue with balloons, and made a real effort for him, but we don’t want to lose our licence for a celebrity, however famous.’

The incident, inevitably, served only to increase Cirque Le Soir’s aura of exclusivity.

Indeed, during the days that followed, the club’s velvet ropes parted for everyone from Princesses Beatrice and Eugenie to pop star Katy Perry (former wife of Russell Brand) and actor Jonathan Rhys Meyers, of BBC2 series The Tudors.

Yet for all the attention, and despite the growing notoriety of Cirque’s scantily-clad performers, no reporter has ever managed to talk their way past Chamonix, the famously discerning South African ‘picker’ who guards the club’s door.

'On each of the five nights a week that Cirque Le Soir’s doors are flung open, this outwardly unremarkable Soho basement becomes a fascinating — if somewhat undignified — temple to turbo-charged consumerism.'

Until now. For this week, I managed to slip undetected into London’s nightspot of the moment in a bid to discover what makes it tick.

Given the hype that surrounds the venue, I was expecting a tawdry freak-show, where underdressed contortionists, fire-eaters and burlesque dancers would perform semi-pornographic dance routines for slack-jawed onlookers.

In the event, the titillation was largely of the Carry On film variety: less explicit than the fare you’d find on page three of a redtop newspaper.

The nearest it came to outrageous was in the nightclub’s ‘chill out’ room where soft-core pornographic videos play on constant loop.

But to watch them, revellers must peer through keyhole-shaped peep holes in a wall.

As I soon discovered, what really makes the place remarkable is not sex, nor even drugs. Instead, its unique appeal revolves squarely around the spending of money — in huge, almost unbelievable, quantities.

On each of the five nights a week that Cirque Le Soir’s doors are flung open, this outwardly unremarkable Soho basement becomes a fascinating — if somewhat undignified — temple to turbo-charged consumerism.

A strange economic apartheid begins at the door, where normal guests are forced to wait in a long queue, before being vetted. Roughly 50 per cent are turned away, after being deemed insufficiently glamorous.

In front of me, for example, two women from South London were denied entry on the grounds that they had failed to wear high heels.

Very different rules exist, however, for those wealthy enough to have booked tables — for £2,000 each.

These big-spenders are known in the trade as ‘whales’ and invariably hail from the U.S., Middle East or Russia.

Regardless of their attire (one group of middle-aged men came in Bermuda shorts and soiled trainers) these wealthy punters were ushered quickly inside, down a twisting Alice In Wonderland-themed staircase decorated with bendy mirrors.

'A strange economic apartheid begins at the door, where normal guests are forced to wait in a long queue, before being vetted. Roughly 50 per cent are turned away, after being deemed insufficiently glamorous.'

Celebrities are also allowed straight in, provided they aren’t footballers, soap actors or reality TV stars, which the club has unceremoniously banned.

Once guests reach Cirque’s main arena, a room roughly 50ft square, surrounded by window displays in which bikini-clad women frolic in a paddling pool filled with bubbles, every single chair is reserved for ‘whales’.

As this elite recline on purple velvet sofas, and hand over black American Express cards to waiters, mere mortals are forced to hover at the bar, where a bottle of lager costs £8 and cocktails start at £15.

On this particular night, the circus entertainment kicked off at around 1am. But the real spectacle had begun earlier, when elite guests started to order outrageously expensive bottles of champagne.

At half-past midnight, for example, the club’s DJ silenced the music (hip-hop or house) and a procession of bare-chested male waiters strode to a corner table carrying ten bottles of Cristal, costing £10,000.

On the neck of each bottle was a fizzing indoor sparkler, which illuminated the room for several minutes, while the waiters danced wildly in front of their customer.

For his £10,000 investment, the purchaser, a middle-aged American, had certainly got himself noticed.

Row: Singer Justin Bieber was upset when he was asked to leave the club on his birthday. It is now said that he was ejected after bringing Jaden Smith, right, to the club despite him only being 14 at the time

In a different corner of the dance-floor, this public display of free-spending was greeted as a challenge.

One table, filled with Arab men, began ordering Jeroboams of Dom Perignon, at £3,000 a go. Another, containing East Europeans, splashed out on Krug worth tens of thousands of pounds.

With every fresh champagne order, the firework ritual was repeated. It was, all in all, a pretty unedifying spectacle of financial one-upmanship in which Cirque’s wealthiest patrons ostentatiously mark out their space at the top of the food chain.

‘In all of the world’s most expensive clubs, you see this style of spending,’ explains Henry Conway, a London nightclub impresario. ‘Everything is about conspicuous consumption, and people want fireworks and glitter bombs when they order the biggest bottle.

'One table, filled with Arab men, began ordering Jeroboams of Dom Perignon, at £3,000 a go. Another, containing East Europeans, splashed out on Krug worth tens of thousands of pounds.'

'For a lot of people, it’s all about getting pretty girls over to their table. When they light the sparklers, it’s literally like lighting a flame and watching moths come over to it. In the trade, we call the girls who do that “table whores”.’

Who are these big spenders? And where is their money from?

Unsurprisingly, it is difficult to get answers to these questions. When I asked the table of Eastern Europeans where their homeland was, one replied: ‘Norway.’

The same shadowy mystery hangs over Cirque’s own finances. While the free-spending is certainly remarkable, given the economic climate, it isn’t entirely clear to what degree Cirque is cashing in.

The club’s original parent company, Cirque du Soir Ltd was dissolved last year, after failing to file accounts.

A sister firm, Cirque du Soir Worldwide Ltd, appears to be inactive. Its current parent, Free Leisure Ltd, boasted assets of £500,000 last August, but has yet to detail its annual profits.

Guests: Both Will.i.am, left, and Bradley Cooper have been spotted at the club which is situated just off Carnaby Street

Its ownership is also opaque. Publicly, it declares its owners to be Berg and Ryan Bish, a 33-year-old Lebanese-Briton whose real name is Ryan Bishti.

Yet Companies House documents show its sole shareholder to be one Hassan Laroussi.

Bishti was in the news recently after being named in the High Court as a former boyfriend of Sara Al Amoudi, the so-called ‘Vamp in the Veil’ who is accused of posing as a Saudi Arabian princess in order to mastermind a £12 million fraud. (The trial is ongoing.)

He also cropped up in a high-profile 2011 court case, when his name cropped up in the trial of Benjamin Boateng, 27-year-old son of Britain’s first black Cabinet minister, Labour’s Lord Boateng.

Boateng was sentenced to three years and ten months in prison after being found guilty of seriously sexually assaulting a 23-year-old woman.

The crime took place at Bishti’s Battersea flat after the two men had returned from an alcohol-fuelled nightclub crawl.

When I tracked down Berg, who attends the club each night dressed as a circus ringmaster, he said he’d ‘prefer not’ to elaborate on the Cirque’s ownership.

Fame: Rapper Kanye West, left, and actor Leonardo Di Caprio, right have been welcomed by the club in the past

As to the outrageous spending, he argued that it was a crucial element of the fun.

‘It’s all part of the show,’ he said. ‘We’ll have sparklers and dwarfs who carry the bottle to the table.

'Sometimes we’ll wheel in a wagon that we can stick someone inside, with a bottle. We try to make it feel special every time.

‘The guests often get competitive. Someone will buy ten bottles, another person will buy 12, to show off.

‘One time, we had someone buy a whole load of Dom Perignon and then send it to other tables, as if to say: “I’m so rich, I can give it away.”’

Berg says Cirque sells a £120,000 Midas of Ace Of Spades roughly once every two months. Many are purchased by Arabs, a fact that led Cirque to open a sister club in Dubai last year.

But increasing numbers of ‘whales’ hail from the Far East, and next year the firm opens a new outpost in Shanghai.

Not that such excess is eschewed by young Brits. Among them is Alex Hope, a rotund, 24-year-old currency trader, who recently tweeted a picture of a £30,000 bar receipt.

‘Cirque Le Soir last night went off! Ace Heaven!’ he declared, adding that he’d spent the money: ‘Because I can!’

In the bizarre, free-spending world of this uniquely vulgar nightclub, there is surely no more appropriate slogan.

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Inside the temple of decadence: Dancing dwarfs, £120,000 bubbly, and Rihanna and Beatrice mixing with VERY shady characters in Britain's most louche nightclub